Weekly Highlights from our Conservative Overlords

Monday, December 24, 2012

Great timing Steve! The Government announces that they won't adopt laws aimed at making gun shows safer. The proposed requirements? Gun show
sponsors would have to notify police and provincial firearms officers
that they are hosting a gun show, and they would have to "ensure the
security and safety of the location and the firearms". Boy, those sound
like tremendous burdens. The reason why these won't be adopted (other
than "because a committee full of gun advocates decided it's
unnecessary"? "The vast majority of gun show hosts and exhibitors
already follow the rules." Shit. That's totally logical! I mean, we
could do away with all sorts of laws now. The "vast majority" of
Canadians don't drink and drive. Let's get rid of those laws too. The
"vast majority" of Canadians don't murder one another. Don't really
need those ones either.

I like this idea that boingboing is following...essentially trying to
understand if gun control laws actually have some effect. This first
story speculates that they might...or might not. It's hard to say as
it's difficult to study the issue without passing actual laws.

These Vancouver Sun
"Top 10 Photos" articles are usually the worst thing ever. This one is kind of interesting. The top 10 Countries in per capita gun
ownership:USA! USA! - #1 at 88.8 guns per 100 CitizensYemen - #2 with 54.8 guns per 100Switzerland - Surprisingly #3 at 45.7Finland - #4 at 45.3Serbia - #5 at 37.8Cyprus - #6 at 36.4Saudi Arabia - #7 at 35.0Iraq - #8 at 34.2Uruguay - #9 at 31.8Sweden - #10 at 31.6Yes.
The USA has more guns per capita that recently war torn Iraq and
Serbia. Within smelling distance of 3 times as many guns. Crazy.

Once again, Matt Taibbi gets the rage going. This time combining two awesome themes: Too Big to Fail and the War on Drugs. This post
highlights the settlement that HSBC made after being caught laundering
Billions of dollars in cartel money. No jail time, just a (relatively
speaking) small fine. He points out the discrepancy between being a
white collar banking executive committing monstrous crimes vs. the
average bloke caught with a joint in his pocket. Pretty fucked up.

I think this guy misses the point a little bit. First, is this a news
piece? Opinion? Anyhow, he points out that all fighter jets are
expensive. And they all cost money to service and operate. Which is
true. But he loses the point of the hullabaloo. All of this was done
without a rigorous evaluation of options. And it was done with figures
that didn't really represent the reality of the situation. Yes, we may
end up with the F-35 in the end. But we need to make an informed
decision and not just buy something because it's awesome. And
"stealth".

Even worse, many of them are unskilled and forced to pay recruitment agencies a large chunk of their earnings. There was a
CBC Radio story a few days ago that interviewed some of these miners.
They talked about how this was a "chance of a lifetime" to make decent
Canadian wages to send back to their families. I softened a bit on this
program. But knowing that most/some of this money is going back to
unscrupulous recruiters completely kills this whole thing for me. No
jobs for Canadians. No finanical windfalls for the Chinese workers. No
actual "advanced skills". This whole program is crazy.

This is kind of a sad commentary of where we are and actually a personal
justification for why I am doing this in the first place. The Conservatives are trying to jam through another Omnibus budget bill.
And the Conservatives are limiting debate. And I've just ignored it
for the last few days. I've come to accept that this is just the way
that things happen. And that's pretty fucking scary.

Interestingly, the morning after the Omnibus Budget vote I'm looking at
the National Post and there is absolutely nothing on their front page
and nothing on their "Canada" page either. I guess it isn't newsworthy
to them. In fact, when I search "omnibus" on their site, absolutely
nothing comes up.

Oh man. Ohmanohman. I'm going to quote an entire passage from this article on the latest Omnibus Bill.As the final group of amendments proposed by the opposition went to a vote late Tuesday
night, the NDP began to chant "2015," a reference to the next federal
election, which is when they say the Harper government will be held
accountable for the bill. (CBC's Kady O'Malley reported that the
Conservatives chanted back, "Carbon tax. Carbon tax.)

I really like this story via boingboing about how some companies
are saving money and improving product by relocating manufacturing to
the United States. Two points:
1) One, as an engineer that buys lots
of expensive equipment, I'm very often surprised by how quite often the
best equipment is also the cheapest equipment. Not always, but it
often seems like for two relatively similar parts, the company that does
a better job of designing it and building it often can make it cheaper.
Great design transcends.
2) How long until somebody thinks "wait a
minute...with all these production efficiencies that we've designed in,
imagine how much cheaper we could make it in China!"
3) I'm also
reminded of an argument I had a few years ago with my brother. "My
economics prof says that the Porsche Boxster is the cheapest car to
manufacturer in the world! And they sell it for $60,000!" I pointed
out to him that maybe it was possible that they manufactured it with the
cheapest amount of labour as compared to any other car due to it's
modular design and modern factory but that it was impossible for a
leather upholstered, high performance engined, mag wheeled, high dollar
suspensioned sports car to cost less to make than a Geo Metro. But no,
he wouldn't agree with me.

Monday, December 3, 2012

So, Canada has gone from moderate negotiator of peace to crazed protector of Israel. A vote for Palestine as a "non-member observer
state" in the UN didn't go our way, so we packed up our diplomats and went home. I'd imagine many of our diplomats aren't even bothering to
unpack we seem to be calling them home so often. When did we take this
turn? What is the reason for it? Is it simply blind support for Israel
through fear of a second holocaust? Islamophobia? Why does Canada get
to decide the way this will play out vs. the other 138 countries that
don't agree with us? The 9 countries that voted against the
motion...those would be Canada, the USA, Israel, Micronesia, Palau, the
Czech Republic, Marshall Islands, Naura and Panama. You remember all
those times in the past when Russia has voted for things that make no sense?
And it just defies all logic that they're standing in the way of
meaningful dialogue and the will of the UN? Ya...that might be us now.

So. I was thinking about the above mentioned Saskatchewan MP story and I
was thinking about why we have so many prairie yahoos doing all kinds
of stupid shit. And I started to think that there must be something to
this...some reason why a disproportionate number of yahoos from the
praries are in Parliament to stir up ridiculousness. To Wikipedia!
Check out the table a few scrolls down from the top of the link. If
Canada were evenly distributed, one MP would represent exactly 113,308
people (with the current number of MP's). We always hear about how
Quebec is over-represented, and sure enough, each Quebec MP represents
around 100,000 people. "The West" is kind of shafted with 114,000 for
BC and 117,000 for Alberta. Ontario actually sees a similar amount of
shaftedness. But you want to talk about crazy over-representation in
Parliament? Look at Saskatchewan, ground zero for MP craziness. 69,000
people. 14 Yahoos that represent around 69,000 people each. This
explains a lot.

An article on vote splitting. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we'll ever
make it to a point where a party is in power that is able to implement
this. Perhaps an NDP/Liberal coalition could push this through.
Perhaps.

There was an interview on the CBC yesterday.
The lady was explaining how "lucky" we are in Canada that damages for
Copyright infringement have been capped at $5000. She was telling us
all about how forensic internet companies had moved into Canada and were
now tracking torrent traffic. Ya. Lucky. A thing that was legal is
now illegal and a bunch of companies are working on suing Canadians (Michael Geist explains it in more detail here).
Awesome. At least we're not Finland, where the fines for illegal
downloading are hundreds of times worse than the fines faced by rapists
and murderers.

I'm really starting to hate the National Post. And the Financial Post
seems to be the place where "rich" assholes can go and talk shit about
how much money they've made on stocks. That's why I love this. November 22nd...A story on how much money there is to be made on RIM.November 27th...A story on the dramatic one day collapse of RIM stock.I
know that this doesn't mean anything long term. I know that there is
still an incredible potential upside to RIM. As well as a potential
that they will go bankrupt. I just hate the certainty that these
articles are written with. When they're just so full of absolute shit
and really have no fucking clue what might happen.